This invention relates generally to search engines and queries.
The World Wide Web has grown dramatically over the last few years and search engines have become the primary mode of discovering and accessing web content for a large fraction of the users. However, even though the users employ search engines for critical information access tasks, they are remarkably laconic in describing their information needs. This behavior might be an outcrop of many factors. Users often use search engines for performing research on unfamiliar topics. Hence, they might skip important details in search queries because they aren't aware of them or haven't built up the correct vocabulary yet. In some other cases users neglect to add certain terms to queries because they believe the terms are obvious from the context or they aren't aware of other ambiguous senses of their incomplete queries. Search engines themselves might reinforce this behavior by not properly taking into account the extra information when the users do provide long descriptive queries.